Clash of the 3D Monsters - VisionTek Ti4600 vs. Gigabyte Radeon 8500

nVidia has had control of the 3D graphics card market for a few years now with little competition until just recently with the release of Radeon 8500 from ATi, not to mention other solutions from SiS and Matrox. Today Cameron "Sov" Johnson takes a look at the VisionTek Ti4600 and Gigabyte Radeon 8500 where he puts them head to head giving us an idea of the features of both but most importantly, which performs the best!

It has been going on for some time now - nVidia, currently the biggest 3D chipset maker has had a great reign at producing some of the best featured and fastest 3D chipsets of the time. We have nVidia to thank for first introducing GPU power which is taking the T&L processing requirements away from the CPU and giving them a proper place on the 3D acceleration chip. This has led to many new developments such as vertex and pixel shaders and greater graphics quality.

ATi has been around for just about as long as nVidia, but hasn't had as a successful run. This mostly has been due to ATI placing their line in the value sector, rather than top grade. This has changed recently with the introduction of their Radeon series chips and greater technology breakthroughs.

Today we are going to throw these two monster companies against each other thanks to VisionTek for the Xtasy TI4600 128MB GeForce 4 video card, and Gigabyte for the AP128D-H Radeon 8500 128MB video card. Let's first take a look at the specifications of each card to see what we have to play with.

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